Mapping Associations - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 103

Fig. 3.11 A virtual landscape of patent class 360 for a period between 1980 and 1984 in
VxInsight. Companies' names are color-coded: Seagate- red , Hitachi- green , Olympus- blue , Sony-
yellow ,IBM- cyan , and Philips- magenta (Courtesy of Kevin Boyack)

shows a virtual landscape of patent class 360 for a period of 4 years between 1980
and 1984. Further issues concerning patent analysis and visualization are discussed
in Chap. 5 .

3.2.4.3 Self-Organized Feature Maps

Another popular metaphor for information visualization organizes information into
adjacent regions on a flat map. Self-organized feature maps (SOMs) (Kohonen
1989 ) have been used in information retrieval. “ET-Map” is a multi-level category
SOM map of the information space of over 100,000 entertainment related Web
pages listed by Yahoo! Hsinchun Chen and his colleagues developed the map at
University of Arizona, USA (Chen et al. 1998 ).
Andre Skupin takes self-organized map techniques further and provides the kind
of look-and-feel of a common geographic map except underneath the familiar
cartographic surface is an abstract space instead of land. Figure 3.12 shows an
example of his work. The base map is constructed based on over 22,000 abstracts
submitted to the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers